Helping Students Connect the Dots: The Power of a Class Plan Slide

While going through my mid-semester survey this semester, I discovered an expert blind spot in myself. One variation of an expert blind spot is where an expert forgets to convey information that is vital for a novice to understand something. In my case, my survey reminded me how important it is to help students connect the dots by explaining why we are doing certain things in class. And one way to do that is by going over the class plan for the day.

[This article is also posted on my personal blog.]

So, I thought I’d write this post to remind you all of this little teaching practice. Perhaps you already do this, so here’s a reminder of why. Or, perhaps, you do not, and this is your invitation to try it since it does not take that much time to implement.

The Practice: Class Plan for the Day

The practice is where you start class by summarizing the plan for that day in a single slide. I do this practice with a slide called “Plan for the week/day” in my large (N = 80–120 students) elective data science class that is semi-flipped and just in time.

To make the context clear, the class is semi-flipped in that they have assigned videos/readings and content knowledge quizzes on that material due 2 days before class (with a 24-hour, no-point-penalty late window). Not all material is in these video/readings, but the majority is. I call these quizzes Prepare quizzes to signal that they are for preparing them to learn/do the material in class and to do the homeworks. Just-in-time means the day before class, I analyze the data from those quizzes (so late students aren’t necessarily in the data set, but the vast majority are) and organize my in-class “chunks” such that the things the students most struggle with are done first. I do this on a weekly cadence where content we don’t get to on the first day flows to the second day. This also lets me triage and sometimes drop things if I don’t think we will finish everything on the second day. But since I order things based on what they found most difficult, I know that we will cover the most important things.

The slide I have at the beginning of each class day lists the main topics we will cover with the key phrase “Struggles in Prepare” to motivate why we are covering those things. This also often reminds me to mention the why for anything else on the slide. Here is a screenshot from our week on data combining, where students learn about groupby, pivot tables, merging data, etc.

On the second day, I take this slide and update it like so:

Notice that I used checkmarks to point out what we finished and yellow to mark things I plan to go back to because I felt like we hadn’t quite nailed those. The second-to-last bullet now has a question mark and a callout to signal that I’m not sure we’ll get to it with a note on how they can get more help on that. But again, I’m the least worried about that topic because while they did struggle on it some in the Prepare quizzes, it was not as much as the other topics, and it was like my borderline, maybe or maybe not cover in class topic.

Anecdata Evidence

I don’t have strong evidence or research-backed literature that this is good to do. There might be some. For now, I will present my anecdotal data because my mid-semester survey responses are what triggered this realization. My anecdotal evidence is that I started creating these slides in week 5 of the semester and released the mid-semester survey in week 6 (yes, we are in a 15-week term, so that seems early — that’s a story for another blog post). And in the mid-semester survey, I was surprised to read a bunch of students in the “What should the class keep?” open textbox saying to keep reviewing what they struggled with on the Prepare quizzes. I’ve never had students mention that in the textbox before, even though I’ve been teaching it like this for 7 semesters. I did tell them on the first day of class that it is flipped and just-in-time in the context of helping them understand how the class is different and it just never occurred to me to emphasize that the entire semester. I’m sure I said it once in a while randomly, but it was never on a slide.

My expert blind spot was assuming they would remember that or it would register at least once the few times I verbalized it. And they would, therefore, know that’s why we were going over material the way we were in class. On reflection, reminding them of this constantly seems obvious, but it just never occurred to me until this moment how important it is to connect the dots for them in this way.

Conclusion

This slide is now a permanent part of my slide deck. Connecting what I am doing with why I am doing it multiple times for students is important. This situation is just another example of why. I have seen “plan for the day/week” slides in the past. I inherited slides with them in other courses and just kept them there without fully understanding at a deeper level why they were there.

However, to all those reading this that might feel guilty that you aren’t doing such a practice now, I’m going to say it’s okay and I feel no guilt that I didn’t start doing this until now. A metaphor I find useful when it comes to teaching is bandwidth. As I gain experience, I increase my bandwidth to do things. As that bandwidth increases, I can add layers to my teaching practice. Some layers work well, and I keep them. Others get discarded as I grow. Some layers require consistent bandwidth to maintain, while others just need an initial investment and very little bandwidth for maintenance.

This metaphor helps me remember that as time passes, I will gain the bandwidth to do more things. So I shouldn’t feel guilty that I wasn’t already doing something yet. The key word there is “yet.” It means I may be able to pick it up in the future when I have the sustainable bandwidth to do it. Teaching is a marathon, not a sprint, and sustainability is important. My teaching was good enough before (because let’s be honest, there is always room for improvement), and now I’ve added another layer to make it better, even though it took my 9th time teaching the course to get that layer in place. And it’s okay that it took so long. My bandwidth wasn’t big enough yet, and my time/energy was spent elsewhere in the course. And that’s okay.